


The Boy Out There

by SickSadWorldLady



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, The Little Prince - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:30:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2752823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SickSadWorldLady/pseuds/SickSadWorldLady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Just because he can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Still, he searches the sky for the little bit of red tucked away amongst the miniature white bulbs anyways. Maybe he’ll get lucky. Authority figures aren’t always right. So what if the experts say it isn’t visible tonight in the Northern Hemisphere, that doesn’t mean he can’t keep straining to find it."</p><p>Veronica and Logan each think about the other the night before he calls in the movie. Both POVs interspersed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Out There

**Author's Note:**

> This work is for the picture prompt (#2) on the December 2014 Veronica Mars Fic Prompts on VMFicRecs, my first submitted prompt!
> 
> It's loosely inspired by The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and takes place after Veronica is watching the news clips of Bonnie's death in the movie.
> 
> The italicized portions are Logan's POV, non-italicized are Veronica.

[DECEMBER VERONICA MARS FIC PROMPTS](http://vmficrecs.tumblr.com/)

 

“But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _The Little Prince_

 

\--

 

1:00 a.m. the clock teases as she shuts her computer and carefully slips out of the apartment.

 

\--

 

_It’s around 22:00 he figures, not wanting to be reminded of time anymore._

 

\--

 

Lugging her body up the stairwell her feet are heavy and she moves quicker than her energy dictates to avoid the cement drying underneath. Still, her feet feel like they’re being lifted by pillowy clouds compared to her head and her heart.

 

All she can think about is his silhouette being led away. ‘Logan Echolls Charged With Murder’ plastered in white below it. Again. _Groundhog Day_ was less repetitive than this story by now.

 

Only a few more flights. The cold grey concrete and harshly lit fluorescents are unforgiving, like she’s back in the sheriff’s station being questioned about her motives. _Go back to sleep_ , they whisper to her. _Take your place in bed alongside your nice, caring, boyfriend. You know, the one whose name is never scrolling through Times Square. The one who loves you. The one who sought you out after you ran._

 

Thirty-seven steps later she reaches the summit. Opening the door slowly she braces for the rush of cool East Coast air. Even though it’s late spring, the chill surprises her as she pushes back against the metal entrance and steps out into the night.

 

\--

 

_Salty warm air envelopes him as he slowly makes his way out across the sliding glass threshold. There’s something grounding about the sea, familiar and organic, that calms him as he steps slowly down to the sand. It’s what drew him to the Navy._

_Three hours. That’s how long he spent in the holding cell, the one with just the singular bunked bed on the back wall. It looked exactly the same as the last time, the time he’d gotten himself jailed just to seek revenge, avenge her pain the only way he really knew how._

_Approximately two hours and 47 minutes of those three hours were spent praying she’d walk through the doors, for old times’ sake, and whisk him away to safety once again. It’s ridiculous and he knows that. She’s in New York, as he learned from his impressive proficiency with search engines. None of her friends would offer that information up willingly he was sure._

_Perhaps he should have been thinking of Carrie, or who knows, literally anything else--like say how to get away with everyone thinking you’re a murderer. That’s not how his mind works though. When times get tough he doesn’t dwell on the actual problem, only her. Before Carrie it was actually a saving grace to think of Veronica instead of the literal war of which he was in the midst. Now it’s pathetic._

_His lungs can still feel the stuffy, cloistered air of the cell and he inhales deeply, hoping like hell that the tide will wash away the past couple days._

 

\--

 

Roofs still scare her, if she’s being honest, but that’s exactly why she comes up here when she can’t sleep. The rush of air, the lack of a true ledge, the car backfiring thirty stories below with the force of a gunshot, they test her, keep her sharp. Her eyes fall close for a second and she’s there again, the rooftop of the Neptune Grand almost exactly a decade ago.

 

It’s not that she hasn’t thought of Logan in the last nine years. Of course she has. There are the obvious times: when an email from Mac popped up with the subject “From a concerned friend” with only a blurry camera phone photo of him in his short-sleeved Navy uniform accompanying it; when she comes across _Easy Rider_ or _Point Break_ flipping through channels; when she spotted that first tabloid shot in the 7-11 of he and Carrie shielding themselves from the paparazzi; when she visited her dad and mapped out the best route to avoid him. Then there are the less obvious times, some which she can explain and others which seem to toy with her for no reason, flash memories that appear before her without reason.

 

There’s also the anniversary of Lilly’s death. His mom’s death. Graduation Night. Every year she wants to call and doesn’t, or can’t, she’s not quite sure.

 

And now every minute for the last eight hours. No matter what she does or where she looks his face is there. In the cab window it’s sad and withdrawn. In her beer it’s angry and manic. Against the blank television screen it’s defiant and amused. In the thick night air it’s despondent and weak.

 

What it never is, is his face now, at 28. She knows what it looks like. Those new razor sharp lines cutting his face into quadrants, the deep bags of bruising purple under his lethargic eyes, the murky oak color they’ve taken on. It’s everywhere on tv. But that’s not the man she knows, the boy really; that’s the man they want the world to see and she refuses to play along.

 

Shivering, she pulls her coat tighter against the thin sleeping shirt she’s wearing underneath and steadies herself against the brick exterior wall of the entrance, tilting her head back just slightly to look at the sky.

 

\--

 

_Down the beach he walks, zig-zagging between the dry sand and the tide-soaked paste. Rough and grainy, it rubs against his feet, and the exfoliating process, literally wiping away his dead skin cells, is cathartic as he messes around, shifting his weight exaggeratedly with each step. Living in Southern California he always took for granted the horizon line, where the stars met the sea in this fantastic visual meshing of fire and water. It was just one of the many things he took for granted._

_Not anymore though. He’ll be lucky to ever see a star again period, let alone get to walk freely down the beach._

_Finally he settles back near the bungalow. Crouching down he plants himself in the sand, letting it mold around him and just stares at that horizon line, memorizing every inch of sand, water, and sky._

_Just because he can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. Still, he searches the sky for the little bit of red tucked away amongst the miniature white bulbs anyways. Maybe he’ll get lucky. Authority figures aren’t always right. So what if the experts say it isn’t visible tonight in the Northern Hemisphere, that doesn’t mean he can’t keep straining to find it._

_Maybe he should take his pilot training and try his hand at NASA. It’s actually kind of common and let’s face it, up in the solar system is probably the closest he’s ever getting to Mars and the furthest he can run from Neptune._

_Of course he doesn’t know of a NASA program for inmates. He’ll write a letter asking to be the test monkey. Far less people would shed a tear over his incineration in outer space than they did that Soviet dog Laika. The dog has a whole little write-up in the Smithsonian for christsakes. TMZ is the only place interested in exhibiting him._

_Again he lets his mind wander to her steely eyes that day in his suite and wonders if she would weep over the loss of his human form, or even if she’d have to dry a single drop from below her eye._

_This is counterproductive,_ he pleads with himself. _Your ex-girlfriend is dead and the entire world thinks you did it. Picturing Veronica’s grief over your hypothetical death isn’t going to keep you out of the sin bin. Again._

 

\--

 

Same stars, different picture, she thinks to herself as she tries to make out just a few struggling fireballs in the dark expanse. On the beach in Neptune she’d lose count of the little white dots providing the faintest light as they reflected against the ocean.

 

Probably the thing she dislikes most about Logan isn’t even really his fault if she’s honest: it’s his presence in Neptune. Sure there were plenty of people in Neptune she hated, and really by now she didn’t even dislike Logan, but he’s there and it’s hard to avoid him when she’s in town. So she stays in New York for the most part. It’s just easier. She knows what happens when she’s around him and she’s worked so hard to resist that temptation, why risk it all for a little surf and sand?

 

Now, though, she misses those clear skies, occasionally swathed with translucent sheets of gauze, with a hunger. She misses the quiet of the ocean and the warm but not suffocating heat. Mostly she misses the ability to truly escape, not just to a noisy rooftop, but to hide away with the sea as your only alibi.

 

New York is great, really, with its own brand of vibrance and an opportunity, even if still not a perfect one, to escape the binds of one’s upbringing. There were just too many people in the city to hold everyone down like Neptune did. She appreciates that about her adopted home. On the other hand, a pair of ruby red slippers to whisk her back and forth wouldn’t be unwelcome.

 

\--

 

_Staring at the sky he’s reminded of a quote his mom told him once when he was little and upset that she was going out of town for the weekend._

In one of the stars I shall be living

In one of them I shall be laughing

And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night

_It was from_ The Little Prince _, like his mom used to call him, referencing his spiky hair, insatiable curiosity, strong distrust of adults, and most of all warm laugh. It was what made him decide to be a pilot._

_He wonders if his mom really is watching him from one of those stars. Logan doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but he can’t help but hope somewhere they’re watching him anyways, protecting him, all the women in his life he couldn’t save: first Lilly, then his mom, and now Carrie._

_Maybe she’s out there right now too, gazing upon the same stars, thinking about him. She had to know what happened by now. Even for someone who worked so hard to get away from Neptune, he imagines she couldn’t fight the urge to investigate, and the coverage was literally everywhere._

_Instinctively he feels an invisible force drop kick him in the gut: what if she think he's guilty? Is that why she hadn’t reached out? He’d assumed it was because after nine years of no contact what was the point, but maybe she thinks he’d really done it, killed Carrie in cold blood._

_No. He had done a lot of shitty things in his life, especially to her, but not even Veronica could think he was capable of this._

_What, then, is she doing right now?_

 

\--

 

Not even in the deepest recesses of her mind did she believe Lamb. Of course, a Lamb with a different middle vowel was a still a Lamb. Horrible, narcissistic, teetering on evil Logan hadn’t hurt Lilly, so there wasn’t any reason for her mind to believe that reformed Logan just up and killed Carrie because he was jealous she might be sleeping with Sean Friedrich. It just didn’t fit. Plus, death by electrocution was just a little morose even for Logan.

 

Only one picture of grown-up Logan made it past her filter. It was the picture they showed briefly, the “Before They Were Killers” shot, of a smiling Logan on the pier during his aircraft carrier’s homecoming. He wasn’t looking straight into the camera, instead bent down on one knee talking with a young girl who looked to be around seven or eight years old. One who looked so much like Lilly she actually did a double take. That was the Logan she knew but in a mature build, doing adult things, acting like the man he could never quite be when they knew each other. And it irrationally hurt, just a little.

 

Why couldn’t he have grown up with her? Why couldn’t he have gotten his act together nine years ago?

 

Why couldn’t she let go of that hope?

 

Even the city which never sleeps is growing quiet below her and she knows she needs to go back downstairs, use whatever will power she has to sleep. Tomorrow is a big day and the last thing she needs is to crash as she sits and waits for someone to tell her what's next for her life, how she will spend her future.

 

Cautiously she stands up and smiles as she makes out the few flickering stars still struggling to show themselves among the smog and clouds. _Take care of yourself Logan_ , she wishes to no one but herself and the air. _You’ll be alright. You always are._

 

With that she pulls opens the roof door and descends back away from the night sky.

 

\--

 

_Casually he reaches into his front pocket and grabs his phone. It’s after 1:00 am in New York. She’s probably asleep, tucked away in her bed in some cool but not too cool studio the size of his closet._

_It takes all of his will power and military training not to push the button next to her name anyways to see if it still works. He’s not sure if it’s the feeling of hopelessness that had been beaten into him all day, or the opposite calming effect of the ocean breeze, but he suddenly knows there’s only way way to save himself: her._

_Tomorrow. He has no choice anymore. So what if she’s angry or ignores his calls. I mean really, what difference did it make to him. If she didn’t save him he was good as dead anyways--a risk-free situation._

_Who knew all you needed to do was be accused of murder, Echolls, to have a legitimate reason to make contact?_

_The idea of calling Veronica calms him. It gives him a renewed sense of hope. Veronica Mars will save him again. She always did. And this time he wouldn’t return the favor by pushing her away, by demanding too much of her. No. This was it. This was the chance he’d needed and he wasn’t going to fuck it up now._

_He feels his own eyes start to droop as he blinks away a yawn. For the first time since he glimpsed Carrie’s lifeless body he wants to sleep. It’ll be restless, sure, but he can finally close his eyes and that’s a start._

_Tomorrow._

_Opening the back door he pauses briefly, saying goodnight to the stars, Lilly, his mom, Carrie, and who knew, maybe even her too._

 

\--

 

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _The Little Prince_


End file.
